Here’s the problem: our group may not be eligible for upgrade. Furthermore, any group that fails to upgrade is “archived”, where it is converted to the new format anyway, but we lose all of our members.

Bummer.

Needless to say, it’s not just One Million Strong. IreGyre’s advocacy group is in the same boat:

we have 6,800+ members and have not been given the upgrade option so we are very likely going to be zeroed out when it is involuntarily archived and converted. Zero members. I will have a doozy of a time trying to get it built back up

Alas, it comes with the territory. Facebook’s a very challenging place to do political activism. Their recent deletion of Chinese blogger Michael Anti’s account is just one a long line of unfriendly actions. Back in 2008, Facebook suspended the accounts of quite a few One Million Strong group members — including me. Since then they’ve been steadily taking away functionality from groups. It’s almost like they don’t want us talking to each other.

But the 2008 election was largely won on social networks, so Facebook’s too important to overlook. The conservative For America page appears to have taken the early organizing lead. One Million Strong for Barack’s just starting to crank up a new Facebook Page, It Begins With Us. It only has about 1100 fans so far so it would be a big disappointment if all the group’s members disappear.

It’s kind of weird when you think about it. Mark and Barack certainly seem to “like” each other. Last month Mark even put on a tie and jacket when Barack dropped at the Facebook Town Hall. Now his company’s on the verge of “archiving” the biggest grassroots group of Obama supporters. What’s with that?

Hopefully once things get escalated to the right level at Facebook, sanity will prevail and the group can move forward. We shall see…

The Electronic Privacy Information Center is featuring it on their website, and its getting quite a lot of on-FB promotion. Please take a moment to sign it and pass it along to those who you feel may be affected by this issue.

[…] 2007, activists on Facebook created the group “One Million Strong for Barack” (which has since been archived), a grassroots effort to show support for then-Senator Barack Obama’s bid for the Presidency. It […]